Which came first: the chickpea or the egg?

 

It’s time to get creative with vegetarian dishes! 

Doesn’t this look gorgeous?  We spied this recipe in Bon Appetit magazine, and we’ve been meaning to try it for quite awhile now.  It’s a rich, hardy stew made with chickpeas and garnished with an egg (can you garnish things with an egg?).  This dish could have been vegan….except for the whole egg thing.

So we start with a hot pan and some sliced garlic.  It gets nice and fragrant after about a minute in the pan.

Then you add a whole bag of spinach.  If you’ve never done this before, it’s pretty fun to watch  all that spinach wilt down into almost nothing. 

 

Then we added some onion and more garlic.  The smell of onions and garlic cooking is so inviting!

Next we added some cumin and smoked paprika.

Apparently there are like at least three different paprikas: sweet, hot, and smoked.  They are not entirely interchangeable.    It just feels so extravagant to have three versions of the same thing!

So, it started to really smell good at this point.

Now we get to add 2 cans of chickpeas and a can of whole tomatoes.  I rinsed the chickpeas in a colander to get rid of all the starchiness from being in the can.

The recipe calls for 5 whole canned tomatoes.  My can had 6 tomatoes in it, but I’m pretty sure that extra tomato won’t hurt anybody!

Next you’re supposed to crush the tomatoes.  This was probably my least favorite part.  Mostly because one of the tomatoes squirted tomato juice all over the kitchen when I squished it (argh).  Do you see the tomato spots off to the side?

This simmers for about 10 minutes.  See that brown stuff on the bottom?  That’s where all the flavor is!

Then you add 3 cups of broth.  Now technically the recipe said to add vegetable broth, but I cheated and used chicken broth.  I mean, I’m going to add an egg at the end, so who are we kidding anyway?

This simmers for another 20 minutes.  It’s important to mash some of the peas while it’s simmering.  They don’t need to be completely mashed (you want some whole chickpeas after all), but the mashing helps thicken the sauce.

Then you add back the wilted spinach from before, and let it simmer another 10 minutes.  So much simmering!  I was getting hungry.  So you could stop here and have a perfectly satisfying meal.  But of course, we’re going to take it one step further…

…and put a fried egg on top.  The recipe said to fry the egg in a decent amount of olive oil.  I’d never fried an egg this way before, but it was worth a shot.  It got a little scary because the heat was up pretty high and the oil kept spitting and sputtering.  But the edges got all crispy and brown, and it was super fast.  Good thing, too, because I’d waited long enough!

 

 

Mmm…delightful.  Going semi-vegetarian never tasted so good!